


Legend

by draginfyre16



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean dies first, Gen, Grief, referenced character death, they both die young, this happens before the ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:34:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28767150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draginfyre16/pseuds/draginfyre16
Summary: A teenager learns about Sam and Dean Winchester 65 years after their deaths.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Legend

Grief is a strange thing. I know that. We all know that, I think.

It shifts form constantly, loses and regains power.

Grief is small, some days, more melancholy than anything else. Gentle, bittersweet reminders of them in a song on the radio or a smell in the air or a sight you see as you walk down the road.

Other days, grief seems alive. It becomes a twisting, roaring monster that you fear will drown you because it is so much bigger and stronger than you are.

Sam Winchester was an expert on grief.

My father told me tales of him.

He was a legend.

A psychic with demon blood. Friends with angels and occasional allies with demons. One of the best hunters there ever was.

But the stories also went like this: that he was someone who never got over losing his brother, Dean. Another legend.

Every hunter had an experience like this. A death they never got over or a face burned into their memory or echoes in their ears that came alive in certain times and places. My father knew this well. He lost his sister at age sixteen to an over-eager werewolf.

I was born long after Sam Winchester but I knew the stories.

I knew that hunters said he didn't often speak, that he preferred to sit in shadowed bar corners and drink the night away, watching games of pool or cards or half-drunk men trying to flirt with waitresses. That he flinched slightly whenever a Led Zeppelin song was played but that his finger tapped along to the beat anyway.

The hunters said he was only twenty nine but that his eyes made him look older.

They said he wore a leather jacket that carried scents of whiskey and smoke and gunpowder. They said that the jacket carried faded old bloodstains. Theories circulated that either the blood couldn't be scrubbed out or that the new owner didn't care enough to try and remove it. Or maybe it just hurt too much to try.

No one was every really sure where Sam Winchester was or what he was doing.

But he did his job. He was a hell of a hunter.

There were rumours.

_ "He lost his brother." _

_ "It was a year ago, back in Kansas." _

_ "Regular demon hunt. But it got Dean before Sam got it." _

I knew Sam Winchester was friends with an angel named Castiel. I'd heard tales that an old friend or a years-dead relative had seen them together. That they shared the same grief over Dean.

There were legends and stories of Sam Winchester and his brother.

Until the whispers told that Sam Winchester was dead. That he had been killed on a demon hunt, same as his brother.

I wondered if he died saving people or if he had died alone in some lonely house in some remote town. I wondered if he chose towns and cities he had never been to because it was less painful than tying to repeat a case where he'd worked with his brother. And I even dared wonder if he hadn't let the demon kill him because he was tired of fighting and never seeming to win or tired of doing it alone.

There were whispers that some people had glimpsed Castiel, standing on a street corner in the brothers' hometown or at the cemetery in Kansas, looking down at the gravestones with the names of Sam and Dean Winchester. Not that there were bodies, of course. It made me wonder who had found Sam.

Word spread that if you passed and you didn't know better, you might see a man in a trench coat in the cemetery. You might wonder who he was and why he looked so sad, why he disappeared when you blinked and why you never saw him go.

The legend of the Winchester brothers grew and was re-told until there was no one alive who actually remembered them.

That took a long time.

I was born fifty years after the death of Sam Winchester.

My father told me the first story about him when I was nine years old. I didn't know much else past stories I could get out of hunters at bars.

But one day I brushed the dust off an old book in my father's office. It was leather-bound and fragile from years of use.

I opened it.

A journal.

_ The _ journal?

How the hell did my father end up with the Winchesters' journal?

I was curious.

So I drove to Kansas. To the cemetery, actually.

My father always said that if you asked him, Castiel would tell you the story. The angel had been around them since the day he pulled Dean out of Hell.

And one day I chanced upon Castiel in the Kansas cemetery.

I had stopped there on my way west to meet up with my father for a hunt. I stood and looked for a long time at the weathered stones bearing the Winchesters' names. I wondered if the legends were true, if the stories were real, what it would have been like to work with them.

I heard a voice speak from behind me.

"Hello. You have a lot on your mind."

I jumped and turned quickly, terrified. "I - I was just wondering if - is it true? All the stories?"

The angel called Castiel smiled again. "Sit down. Let me tell you everything."

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first fic. If you read it, thank you!


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